Florence Sally Horner

Florence Sally Horner (1937–1952) was a girl abducted by a child molester in 1948.

Abduction

At the age of 11, Horner stole a 5-cent notebook from a store in Camden, New Jersey. Frank La Salle, a 50 year-old mechanic, caught her stealing, told her that he was an FBI agent, and threatened to send her to "a place for girls like you". Then he abducted the girl and spent 21 months traveling with her over different American states and raping her. While attending school in Dallas, Texas, she confided her secret to a friend. Later she escaped from La Salle, and phoned her sister at home, asking her to send the FBI. La Salle was arrested and claimed that he was Florence's father; however, the FBI found that her father had died seven years previously. La Salle was sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison. Florence Horner died in 1952 in a car accident at age 15.

Cultural References

Critic Alexander Donlinen proposed in 2005 that Frank La Salle and Florence Sally Horner were the real life prototypes of Humbert Humbert and Dolores "Lolita" Haze from "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov. [Ben Dowell, [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1774602,00.html "1940s sex kidnap inspired Lolita"] , "The Sunday Times", September 11, 2005. Accessed on November 14, 2007.] Though Nabokov had already used the same basic idea — that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as man and daughter — in his then unpublished 1939 work "Volshebnik" ("Волшебник"), it is still possible that he drew on the details of the Florence Horner case in writing "Lolita". An English translation of "Volshebnik" was published in 1985 as "The Enchanter". Nabokov explicitly mentions this case in Chapter 33, Part II of "Lolita": "Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?"

External links

* [http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dolilol.htm "What happened to Sally Horner?"] , by Alexander Dolinin.
* [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1774602,00.html "1940s sex kidnap inspired Lolita"] , by Ben Dowell. "Sunday Times", September 11 2005.

Footnotes